Adam Richter (@AdamDRichter) of the Wallifaction Blog (he researches John Wallis) tells me that the Society of Jesus, known colloquially as the Jesuits, was officially recognised by Pope Paul III on 27th September 1540. He gives a short list of Jesuits who have contributed to the history of science over the centuries. Since this blog started I have attempted to draw my readers attention to those contributions by profiling individual Jesuits and their contributions and also on occasions defending them against their largely ignorant critics. I have decided to use this anniversary to feature those posts once again for those who came later to this blog and might not have discovered them yet.

5 responses to “Jesuit Day”

For the “126 arguments”, http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1103/1103.2057.pdf is fascinating; thanks for the link. The primary argument against C is the immense size of the fixed stars, as implied by non-parallax and the disks seen in telescopes. The answer to this – that the disks are from diffraction – wasn’t known then but it seems to me that they could have been known to be unreal, because the measured disk would depend on the aperture of the telescope. Did no-one notice that, do you know?

The person to ask is Chris Graney, he’s the expert. However if I remember correctly from Chris’s lecture last Monday in Bamberg it’s first at the end of the seventeenth-century that people became aware that what they were seeing was an artefact. It wasn’t until the nineteenth-century that it was known what caused that artefact. I’m sure the answer to your question will be in Chris’ book😉